VoCA - a huge fan of German art galleries - went to the Hamburger Bahnhof today, a contemporary art museum housed in a former train station.

The spaces are large and white, perfect for all the enormous Anselm Kiefer works, including the lead fighter plane in the middle of the space and the large scale library of lead books, which seemed to be embedded with seeds of some kind. In the middle of this semi-enclosed library was a glass polyhedron with what looked like analogue film strips inside.

Anselm Kiefer, Volkszählung, 1991. Image: ncf.ca

Nearby, the curators had hung an engraving of Melancholia, by Albrecht Durer. Turns out that Kiefer has been inspired by the figure of Melancholia, and the polyhedron sculpture was taken from one in Durer’s image.

Albrecht Durer, Melancholia I, 1514. Image: wikimedia.org

Other highlights of the permanent collection included a fantastic two-montior video by one of VoCA’s favorite artists, Bruce Nauman. The piece showed two hands fashioning a balloon dog from a limp balloon on the upper montior, while a cup of coffee is dropped onto a table, crashing and smashing the saucer, all in slow motion, on the lower monitor. A perfect depiction of heaven and earth, lightness and gravity, imagination and reality…

Bruce Nauman, Falls, Pratfalls and Sleights of Hand (Clean Version), (Detail) 1993. Image: raster.art.pl

Massive galleries dedicated to favorite German artist/shaman Joseph Beuys were fantastic. Huge sculptures of fat, felt suits, lead breastplates…it was all there and restored our faith in great art.

Joseph Beuys, Felt Suit, 1970. Image: nationalgalleries.org

As well, it made AA Bronson’s recent revival of shamanism seem particularly timely. (Note young Winnipeg artist and participant in AA’s show, Michael Dudeck - check his work out HERE.)

One final highlight was Rodney Graham’s excellent 75 Polaroids from 1976, images taken in a forest at night, using only the flash from the camera as the light. Housed in a darkened room, the images are very “Blair Witch Project”, but relate to Graham’s interest in dark and light and the concept of enlightment and illumination.

In the upstairs galleries, VoCA discovered some new artists - the fantastic, kooky and energizing photographers Anna & Bernhard Blume, whose photographs from the 1980s and 1990s are incredibly charming and unique. We can’t believe we hadn’t known of their work before today!

The large scale, black and white images showed the pair, dressed in costume, occasionally digitally altered (in one image, the man’s eye pops out like a comical Guston image, in another the face is digitally stretched out for several inches) interacting with wooden shapes or household objects like vases, teapots, upholstered furniture. It’s hard to describe in words.

Bernhard Blume and Anna Blume, Kitchen Frenzy, 1986. Image: moma.org

Bernhard Blume and Anna Blume, Kitchen Frenzy, 1986. Image: moma.org

Finally, there was a show, Lighter, by British photographer Wolfgang Tillmans on view. We have always liked Tillmans’ work, but thought that it was kind of “seen it once, seen it a thousand times…” But we were only partly right. It was the kind of show you could go through at a brisk pace - the work doesn’t demand too much of the viewer - but we were struck by Tillmans’ ability to stretch the medium. Best were his folded wall constructions, and his Paper Drops and abstract Mental Pictures. His tables installation was pretty good, too.

Wolfgang Tillmans, Lighter III, 2006. Image: teezeh.de

Wolfgang Tillmans, Paper Drop (Berlin), 2007. Image: teezeh.de